Eurogamer.net talks with XCOM: Enemy Unknown producer Jake Solomon and original X-COM designer Julian Gollop about how the new installment in the series lives up to its forebears. "I think Firaxis has done a great job," Julian Gollop told them. "The game is addictive and absorbing, not to mention quite challenging on the classic difficulty setting."

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It's just too bad that the challenge comes from the AI cheating and purely random shit happening to you that you can't do anything about. It's not a difficulty where the AI simply plays smarter than you do; it just cheats instead.

No diss on the game, which is fantastic, but it would have been nice if Classic could have been made difficult through smart AI, rather than giving them shitty bonuses and having totally random bullshit happen in the strategy map.

The Warspace mod does alleviate these issues somewhat, fortunately, but it's a bitch to get mods running in this game.

Scroll down to "BalanceMods_Hard=" and to the right of that you can see "ICritHit=10" and "iAim=10" just zero those out such as "iCritHit=0" for everything in the "BalanceMods_Hard=" section and your good to go on Classic Difficulty with full AI and No cheating.

"Hard" = Classic Mode and "Classic" = Hard Mode in that .ini file by the way.

Save a backup and there ya go!

Those weren't the only things that bugged me about Classic, to be honest. Even with those shitty bonuses, I was able to do the combat portions quite easily. It's the stupid strategy part that really fucking annoys me.

And calling it "strategy" is kind of a misnomer, since it's basically "BUILD WORKSHOP BUILD SATELLITE UPLINK BUILD SATELLITES AND HOPE TO GOD IT'S ENOUGH!!!"

And then hope that the big UFO doesn't show up until month 4 rather than month 3.

It's always the same thing you do. Oh, did you want to build more labs in month 2? Well, you can't, because you NEED TO build satellites to keep the world from turning into a fucking melting pot of insanity. The ridiculous spread of panic across a continent is insane. Like the rest of Europe is going to panic if a Frenchman gets kidnapped by Aliens. If anything, they'd be fucking cheering. Warspace tones that down quite heavily as well.